In the beginning…

After a busy day of work, family responsibility, community responsibilities, personal time to recover from the stress of all of these things, finding time to write, let alone having the mental strength to come up with anything to write, sometimes you just have to force it out. That is what this is. Forced……As an exercise, however, it’s great to do this. The first several times, it will be painful, but as you start working out those brain muscles you will begin to increase your ability to write content. Some writers call this finding your voice.

So what is my motivation to want to write? I want to write a book. In fact, I have started a book. I started it one night at about 11pm at night, handwriting over 8 pages. I went to bed early, couldn’t sleep, and got out of bed, grabbed a pad of paper, sat on the couch and wrote. I wrote until I felt satisfied I had emptied my head of the ideas swimming in there.

Those 8 pages went untouched for weeks before I even read them again. Then months before I even thought more about, but I couldn’t make any headway with it. They went into a notebook, in my book case for a couple of years before I pulled them back out and elaborated on the idea. I typed what I had handwritten, and wrote an prologue to help build the story behind my story. I felt I needed a foundation to build off of to give my readers some explanation of where this story came from. I thought this was what was needed.

Those writings had a huge desire to grow, but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know the conflict to create, I didn’t know the characters, I didn’t know who was going to win in the end and who was going to lose. So, I felt I needed to build these. Well, that never happened.

I created a small group of about 3-4 of us to create this story into a graphic novel. That approach failed. So, now I am back to it being a regular novel, but, I was still lost. I bought books on writing novels, but I still haven’t read them after a year or more of owning them. I doubted my ability to write in this form. I have written lyrics, hundreds of them. I had written poems, an equal amount. When I was a teen, I would write all of the time and I would write a lot! I was considered quite prolific, actually. Of course, my interests and motivations changed over the years and I am no longer as prolific as I used to be, by far.

I think about this story often and I have even added another chapter. That makes 2 chapters done. Then it sits. I am impulsive, and expect fast results. I don’t like doing things in part. I want it all done at once. For example, if I need work on my car that requires breaks, suspension work, and new tires, I can’t just do one of those three items and feel satisfied. I know one can effect the other and so I am driven to do it all at once. The problem is the amount of money required to do it all at once instead of a little at a time is very different. Same with this story. I would love to escape to the woods for a year to write this book, but it would not be easy and the life cost is way too high. So, one page at a time, I guess. Another saying related to this is, you don’t eat an elephant in one bit, it’s too big. You eat it one bite at a time. Sorry if you like elephants….

So what is next? I don’t know! Other than really expressing my frustration about not writing, or not being able to write, here I am. I hope that writing here about topics of interest will exercise my brain and my writing voice to build up endurance and motivation to work on the book and continue to create the story it is meant to tell.

I thank you for hanging out for a while as you read through this. Back to the basics of blogging. Cheers!